There are fewer than 4,000 billionaires worldwide, and they now hold a record $15.1 trillion. That’s nearly half of the U.S. economy

How many students made up your college cohort? Odds are its about 4,000—the same, if not more, than the total number of billionaires on earth.

Think about the last time you went to a sports stadium, to a concert venue, or even visited a small coastal town ahead of the fall holidays. The fewer-than 3,800 billionaires worldwide make up just one-fifth of a full house at MSG, a tenth of Yankee Stadium, and the population of your average New England town. And out of a world of more than 8 billion people, they make up a sliver so thin it barely registers: about 0.00005%, or one in every two million people alive today.

And yet, that sliver holds a record $15.1 trillion, according to Altrata’s Billionaire Census 2026 — close to half the size of the entire U.S. economy (at $32.5 trillion per the St. Louis Fed), and nearly 30% of the combined GDP of the G7 nations (at $52.06 trillion per the IMF).

The population grew 8.2% in 2025, the fastest pace in five years, but the gains are not shared equally. Twenty-nine people now hold fortunes above $50 billion, dubbed superbillionaires in Altrata’s report, and together, they hold $4.1 trillion, or 27.2% of all billionaire wealth. But less than a decade ago, in 2017, just 10 people held that same status and controlled only 7.2% of the total billionaire wealth.

Most of the superbillionaire rise has come in the last two years alone, as the share stood at 16.3% as recently as 2023, while public rankings point........

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